Dr. Kristin Shrader-Frechette is a senior scholar whose research has explored the diverse relationships between peoples and environments. Dr. Shrader-Frechette has advanced ground-breaking work in rational and scientific quantitative risk assessment methodologies, all while framing her findings through the concept of environmental justice. In researching the world as it is, Dr. Shrader-Frechette’s research has helped to guide the creation of communities where all are offered the opportunity to live in healthy environments – the world as it should be.

Dr. Shrader-Frechette’s ground-breaking research can best be seen her book Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy. She has developed quantitative assessments for risk and damage, leading to assessments that take into account factors that have not been included in traditional quantitative risk assessments and risk-cost-benefit assessments. These have included the plurality of risks, geographical and temporal diffusion of realized damages, ecosystem services and non-market values and resources, all in support of the well-being and health of people in and across generations.

In addition to this community-focused research, Dr. Shrader-Frechette has achieved considerable success in developing methods that examine hazardous waste management and commercial nuclear fission in the U.S. Her research demonstrates how environmental burdens, risks, and vulnerabilities from these industries are inequitably distributed both geographically and temporally across different ethnicities, socio-economic groups, political positions, and generations. Dr. Shrader-Frechette’s work continues to assure the social legitimacy of claims by communities around the world that are demanding that these inequalities be rectified.

Dr. Shrader-Frechette continues to voice concern about technocratic individualism and how those who advocate unsustainable corporate and individual practices have increased the potential for ecological risks in the global environmental commons. Throughout her work, Dr. Shrader-Frechette calls for achieving intergenerational environmental justice in today’s society where reaching this on a global scale, community by community, is most urgent.

This year marks the thirtieth time that the International Cosmos Prize is being awarded. Dr. Shrader-Frechette’s scientific and philosophical approach to environmental justice necessarily speaks to relationships with all of life, through biodiversity, universality, interdependence, and ecosystem services. As these relationships lie at the heart of the idea for the International Cosmos Prize, we are honored today to congratulate Dr. Shrader-Frechette as the deserving recipient of the 30th International Cosmos Prize.